Quick guide on getting started:
Pick up:
-Superior items: Quality that adds up to 40+% for the same item will give you an orb of the respective type at a vendor; Armourer's Scrap for Armour, Blacksmith's Whetstone for Weapons, Glassblower's Bauble for flasks, Gemcutter's Prism for skill gems, Cartographer's Chisel for maps. You can start to skip the weapons and armour after you have a hundred or so of each orb, but Prisms and Chisels are quite valuable right into the endgame.
-Red/Green/Blue sockets, linked on one item will give you a Chromatic Orb. You will likely need tons of these.
-Six sockets will give you seven Jeweller's Orbs. Six LINKED sockets will give you a Divine Orb, but you're sometimes better off selling the base item to a crafter. Items can drop with six sockets at item level 50. Five-link stuff is worth picking up too, but hold on to it to sell or use. Only body armour, bows and most two-hand weapons can have five or six links.
Tips:
For building, pretty much everything stacks. Abuse it. They WANT you to come up with new and interesting ways to kill shit as quickly as possible.
Identify every magic item you're selling. Alteration shards are higher up the chain than Transmutation shards. The only time you shouldn't is early on in the game, as you should just sell the Transmutation shards and orbs for scrolls. I generally stop picking up anything but rares and uniques (unless they are the base I want) after a certain time, when I start getting enough scrolls dropping that I don't need to sell orbs to keep up anymore.
Vendors and Masters can sometimes sell items with Quality and valuable socket combos for the same price they would sell the normal item, and you can sell it right back to them for the actual value. You can hold ALT to see the sockets of everything on the page, but you have to mouseover the items to see if they have quality.
Vendors change their stock as you progress through the story, but Masters only change their stock after they level up, or after you do their Daily Mission once you have a hideout.
Get a hideout asap (need a lvl three master) and invite the two that jive best with your build. You can eventually have all the masters once you have one at level 7, and they level up much more quickly doing daily missions than they do just finding them in the wild. Masters sell skill gems with quality, and very rarely sell the drop-only gems. Once you max them out they also have a 25% chance of selling a random unique after every daily mission. It is possible to get some decent high-end items this way. Hideouts and master XP are shared across characters in the same league. Daily missions reset at 8pm Eastern time, no matter what time you last completed them.
I HIGHLY recommend buying a few points, and getting AT LEAST the Currency Stash Tab and a couple of extra regular tabs. Tabs go on sale every month or so. Premium tabs can be used with third-party apps for trading (this is not something I've looked into much.) The Divination Card and Essence tabs are handy, too, but not so much until later on. You will probably need extra tabs more than extra character slots (you get 24 char slots to start, I think) although there don't seem to be any restrictions on multiple accounts to use as mules.
Hope this helped!
Addendum:
The game, at certain points, seems to be balanced around you having a "GTFO" skill, aka a Movement skill. Leap Slam, Whirling Blades, Blink Arrow, Lightning Warp, whatever. Find one that synergizes and learn how it works. Add faster attack/faster cast.
Find a Vaal skill that works well with your build and save it for "OH FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-" moments. I can't tell you how many times Vaal Detonate Dead has saved my ass.
Vorici's crafting bench (once you get him in your hideout) is probably the most useful, even if you don't intend to do any serious crafting, as it lets you spend Fusing and Chromatic orbs to get a guaranteed result. It costs more than you might spend in most cases, but it beats the hell out of spending half an hour clicking orbs. Great for getting socket colours that are rare on a particular item (red on an Evasion piece, for instance.)
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